Telemedicine is revolutionizing healthcare access

"Our vision of Smart Healthcare from a patient perspective is that the moment he or she has an event, qualified personnel take control, be it in ambulance, emergency room procedures, OT, ICU, recovery room or discharge, and all these should happen in a seamless manner with complete access to patient care and his records," said Dr Ravi Ramaswamy, senior director, patient care and clinical informatics, Philips Innovation Campus, Bangalore. uilding on this concept, Philips launched a comprehensive Intelli Hospital in May 2012.

The Philips MRx is comprehensive life-saving equipment available in an ambulance that enables monitoring of the most significant vital signs of a patient along with the ECG. The equipment is also capable of delivering lifesaving "cardio version shocks" in patients with a cardiac standstill, allowing them to be resuscitated. The machine is also capable of transmitting 12-lead ECG and vital information to a remote hospital through a slew of wireless technologies that it can handle and coordinate with.

Phillips has another solution, Trace Master Vue, which is an informatics solution accessed by physicians to view and interpret ECG. Then, for the OT complex, there is the MX 800 composite monitor, which is a comprehensive patient monitoring device. The anesthesia workstation from Philips enables an anesthetist to worry less about entering data during surgery and focus more on actual patient care and monitoring and making clinical decisions. The information system automates the charting of data coming from the MX800 and ensures that all vital data are captured for the entire duration of the surgery.

The newest addition to the Intelli Hospital is the consultative eICU through which Philips enables a hospital to integrate all independent ICUs under a single remote command center and monitor patients in these ICUs 24x7. The eICU also opens up new business opportunities by allowing larger hospitals to integrate with ICUs in smaller hospitals and thereby extend their experience and efficiency of care to locations that they would otherwise not be able to reach.

Cloud-based solutionsIndia-based Opto Circuits has launched the eTraq application that allows a medical practitioner to use a BlackBerry PlayBook to remotely access patients' physiological parameters collected through eTraq Transport Monitors. The objective of this application is to provide real-time critical patient information to enable quick diagnostics. An eTraq Transport Monitor is a portable, light-weight unit that provides five-parameter monitoring.